Becoming Your Dream Analyst: How to Learn and Sharpen Your Skills for a Career in Analytics

The tools of a business analyst are their skills and their ability to utilize these skills to analyze data and provide information that helps businesses to improve their processes, products, services, and software. 

For MBA students interested in a career in analytics, putting in the effort to learn and improve your analytics skills will make you very competitive as it communicates to employers your tenacity for personal development and ability to learn new things.

Just as the availability and ease of access to data have opened a gateway for job opportunities in analytics, programs, and courses have followed suit in terms of providing knowledge and resources to MBA students and the likes interested in business analytics. There is, therefore, an overflow of courses, and platforms that one can utilize to learn new software skills as well as hands-on experiences that facilitate the practice of data analysis and decision making. 

Below are some important platforms, courses and certificates to boost your skills and prepare you for a career in analytics.

Google Analytics Academy

The google analytics courses are a must-learn for any MBA student interested in a career in analytics. The reasons being that, it is free, very popular and a widely used analytical tool in most organizations.

The academy provides 4 courses online, with the goal of helping learners to understand and be able to use the google analytics software in monitoring and improving the online presence of an entity. Google analytics can be used in assessing marketing strategies and maximizing the benefit of online marketing.

A certificate of completion of course, shareable on LinkedIn and other social media platforms is awarded for completing any of the courses. The courses provided by the academy can also help in preparing for the Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) exams—an industry-recognized qualification.

The courses are;

1.  Google Analytics for Beginners 
2. Advanced Google Analytics
3. Google Analytics for Power Users
4. Getting Started with Google Analytics 360

Social Platforms for Analyst

Data Science Central

Data Science Central is the industry's online resource for data practitioners. Data Science Central provides a community experience that includes a rich editorial platform, social interaction, forum-based support, including the latest information on technology, tools, trends, and career opportunities. site covers a wide array of data science topics regarding analytics, technology, tools, data visualization, code, and job opportunities. The site updates frequently, nearly two blog posts a day from contributing writers, and it also offers a community forum for discussion or questions. 

Kaggle 

Kaggle is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners which allows users to collect and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine-learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.  If you are new to data science, you can use Kaggle for learning purposes. There are blogs, interviews, and articles related to techniques in data science. Subsequently, you can join to take part in the competition.

Online Learning Platforms

These are all paid classes, but one can audit the class for free. One should consider auditing classes on these platforms if they are looking at learning or improving a skill and hence do not need a certificate. 

Coursera

Coursera is an online learning platform and has hundreds of analytics courses one can choose from depending on what jobs you are looking to apply for or the skill gap you intend to fill. Below are a few popular business analytics courses on Coursera.

1. Business Analytics Specialization

Offered by: Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Overview: The course provides an introduction to big data analytics for all business professionals, including those with no prior analytics experience. Hopes to teach students how data analysts describe, predict, and inform business decisions in relation to marketing, human resources, finance, and operations. There is a final Capstone Project, where students apply their skills to interpret a real-world data set and make appropriate business strategy recommendations. 
This specialization contains 5 courses which are; 

• Customer Analytics 
• Operations Analytics 
• People Analytics 
• Accounting Analytics 
• Business Analytics Capstone 

Duration:  3 months 

 2. Excel to MySQL: Analytic Techniques for Business Specialization

Offered by: Duke University

Overview: This course specialization allows students to use tools and methods such as Excel, Tableau, and MySQL to analyze data, create forecasts and models, design visualizations, and communicate insights. This course also comes with a Capstone Project which focuses on optimizing revenues from residential property and Airbnb.

This specialization contains 5 courses which are;

• Business Metrics for Data-Driven Companies
• Mastering Data Analysis in Excel
• Data Visualization and Communication with Tableau
• Managing Big Data with MySQL

Duration: 7 months

edX

Similar to Coursera, edX is an online learning platform that MBA students interested in careers in analytics may utilize to learn and improve their analytics skills. Below are some few business analytics courses on edX work considering; 

 1. Analytics for Decision Making 

Offered by: Babson College 

Overview: Provides students with the fundamental concepts that support modern data science and help them to analyze different data types in order to make informed business decisions. 

Duration: 4 Weeks 

2. Introduction to Data Analytics for Managers

Offered by: University of Michigan 

Overview: Utilizes a combination of lectures, case studies, and practical learning to teach the fundamentals of data analytics techniques and its application in business. Explores data science and analyze business data with Microsoft Azure through machine learning, SQL, and other statistical tools with the focus on business applications.

Duration: 6 weeks 

All these learning platforms and more including Youtube also provide courses and tutorials on the use of specific software, for example, SQL, Python, R and so on. 

The journey of a data analyst is one that involves continuous learning as the problem they tackle keeps on changing just like their tools. Developing a culture of self-learning and development is, therefore, important to broaden your ability to analyze varieties of data and provide good insights and make valuable decisions from them.